Historian James Fox in front of a 14m-high Maori carving of the Polynesian navigator Ngātoro-i-rangi by Lake Taupo, New Zealand.
Photograph: Ben Harding/Clearstory/BBC

Here is a sculpture of the Virgin Mary, cradling her baby, naked and standing on a severed head. It is fabulous, one of the best versions of the Madonna and Child you will ever see. She also has tattoos all over her face. “What could be more inappropriate than a tattooed Virgin Mary?” asks the art historian James Fox, presenter of Oceans Apart: Art and the Pacific (BBC Four). The 19th-century Anglican missionaries won’t have been too keen, but its Māori creator wouldn’t have cared. The Māori were, points out Fox, attached to their culture and resistant to invaders. “The Māori didn’t see it as a choice between one thing and the other. They simply took the Christian ideas they liked and incorporated them into their cultural traditions.”

The theme of this documentary was not domination or colonisation, but “encounter” between the indigenous population and the incomers, and Fox is fascinated with the art and objects that came out of this. A patu – a club-type weapon – was recreated in brass back in England by natural scientist Joseph Banks, who was aboard Captain Cook’s voyage to New Zealand; he hoped to take them back to England to trade or offer as gifts to powerful people. A double-barrelled shotgun was sold to a Māori warrior, who had its walnut stock adorned with intricate carvings. “A fascinating example of hybrid culture,” says Fox, going on to briefly mention the ensuing arms race between tribes, in which 40,000 Māori would lose their lives.

Although Fox is enthralled by the aesthetic possibilities of cultural cross-pollination, the overall effect was to downplay the destruction wreaked by the invaders. Cook’s encounters “were destructive, without doubt”, Fox acknowledges at the end, “but they were also creative. Because when these different societies, once oceans apart, were thrown together, they produced a kind of artistic alchemy, and that story, one of both conflict and collaboration, has shaped the global imagination.” But I would have liked to see more than the few photographs of Māori subjugation included here and the analysis of a portrait – painted by a white New Zealander – of an elderly Māori chief, “filled with symbols of downfall”, looking dejected in a crumbling meeting house.

There were flashes of anger and injustice from a couple of the contributors: one woman of Māori descent, Charlotte Gibson, says she wants an apology; another, Anaru, his face covered in traditional tattoos from his tribe, says he does not recognise the name New Zealand, which “means nothing to me. It’s a name that a Dutch explorer by the name of Abel Tasman gave to our land and it means nothing.” His tattoos, called moko, “remind people and remind the world that the Māori culture – our culture, language, traditions, art, songs, dances – is alive and well because there was a misbelief that the Māori people were a dying race.”

Back on more familiar cultural ground, Fox does some fascinating decoding of Māori symbolism. A meeting house was “a symbolic representation of an ancestor’s body”, its rafters denoting the ribs. Fox unpicked the meanings of the moko of the sculpture in the middle of the structure – spirals mean he was involved in horticulture, patterns around his mouth tell us he was a great orator – and a pole coming from his head show his descendants (male: they all have penises).

The designs on a beautiful paddle, traded with Cook’s crew, are called kowhaiwhai – the curves represent the water as it flows past the canoe, while swirls denote the movement of a hammerhead shark. It would have been nice to know what Anaru’s tattoos meant: “Each design has a meaning to it,” he says, “we wear our stories.” But he isn’t asked to explain further. It is a small thing, but elsewhere, too, in this documentary, it occasionally felt as if there were bits missing.

Fox, though, is an engaging and enthusiastic guide. A carved wooden panel of three faces used to illustrate moko by the artist Tene Waitere is “one of the masterpieces of 19th-century sculpture” and is, says Fox, “profound and gripping … absolutely exhilarating”. Lisa Reihana’s incredible 26m-long video installation, In Pursuit of Venus, featuring Cook’s landing is “breathtaking”. There is due reverence for present-day artists, such as Matahi Whakataka Brightwell, making a beautifully carved war canoe using traditional methods. Today, says Fox, Māori culture is an integral part of New Zealand’s national identity. This documentary paid tribute to that determination.